The Commedia can be read in many ways. Dante himself suggests four: as the literal account of a journey, as an allegory of the soul’s ascent, as moral instruction, and as an analogy of Scriptural teachings. These readings and many others occur simultaneously as we accompany Dante in his chronicle of events and characters and ideas that will continue to haunt us long after the last line. But like Dante seeing the perfect friezes sculpted by the hand of God in Purgatory, we feel that nothing we can say or do can adequately respond to the perfection of the poem. The critics who have annotated its every detail, the poets who have recast his words into their own tongues, the artists who have attempted to mirror it on canvas, in film, music, even architecture, have never succeeded in fully comprehending the Commedia.
A small speck of his universe may be fleetingly caught but the vast complex totality always escapes even the best of its readers.
An attempt to portray several of the characters of the Commedia in the form of puppets, may seem a peculiar gesture. Puppetry is one of the minor arts, like embroidery of bottle-playing, but it is an ancient one going back to at least the fifth century BCE in Greece. I began making puppets in my adolescence and kept practicing the craft in secret. After reading the Commedia daily for almost two decades, I thought I could offer the poem this modest tribute from one of its countless readers.
COMMEDIA
Begun probably while Dante was still in Florence but written mainly during his long exile, the Commedia, so called because it has a happy ending, was finished not long before Dante’s death in 1321.
The Commedia (called Divina by Boccaccio) is the detailed chronicle of Dante’s visit to the three realms of the Otherworld, Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, a spiritual quest in which Dante encounters dozens of characters –historical and fictional—and which in the end will lead him to be ready to receive the final vision of the Godhead.